Professional Opinion

Today, I want to talk about Professions. For most of Wulf's life, he's been a skinner/leatherworker. It's a great combination for a Hunter since the resources you need to skin to make your leather goods are the very beasts you're killing. In fact, if you're lucky, you can actually end up skinning beasts that other people have killed. It's free money!

The armor a leatherworker can make is usually decent, if slightly underpowered compared to dungeon drops, but often easier to get. Wulf used to spend many idle hours on the Burning Steppes killing Dragonkin by the Hundred in order to get scales to make armor for him and his fellow Hunters in CD.

In the Burning Crusade however, Leatherworking's changed. Leatherworking, like every other profession, is hard work now.

When you start, it's simple enough and the first 30-or-so points fly by in a frenzy of slaughtering and skinning mobs. After that, it get's very expensive in terms of leather and by the time you hit the mid-340's leather alone won't do it anymore. The patterns past that point require increasing amounts of Primals. Primals are made by collecting 10 motes of the required element (such as Earth, Air, Water, Fire, Shadow, Mana, Life, etc). If I go all out on the grind, and am exceptionally lucky, I can collect one primal's worth of motes ever 30-45 minutes. Since this guide suggests I'll need something in the region of 145 Primals to reach Leatherworking 375, then that equates to over three whole days of grinding to collect the necessary Primals, which is to say nothing of the other materials.

And once I get to 375? Well then I can grind even more Primals (another 72 by my count) to make this armor, which I'll admit is pretty awesome. But it's a lot of work to fit around the act of playing with my friends. Still, I'll get there eventually, I guess.

Even further into the Burning Crusade...

Here's a picture of Wulf after the weekend with his Ravager pet, Feature (it's not a bug...). I'm almost ashamed to say that I did nothing but play Wow all weekend. Still, I managed a lot in that time:

I got home Friday and ended up doing runs to the first two wings of the Auchindoun Instance. It was good fun, although largely lootless. After the first wing, Mana Tombs, Wulf dinged 66 and gained access to the Kill Command ability. As a damage-dealing ability, it's kinda mediocre, but it's useful to give your pet's aggro-building abilities a boost.

After the runs, I spent a few hours questing in and around Naggrand, getting Wulf a good way to level 67 before going to bed. I also finished collecting materials for a nice upgrade for Wulf's pants.

I then spent Saturday questing and running Dungeons with friends. Nothing too significant there except for the fact that I completed a quest that gave me a nice gun that was a significant upgrade to the other ranged weapons Wulf had. The only downside is that I didn't have access to a good Ammo Pouch for it, so I consigned it to my bags. I noticed that The Consortium had a decent ammo pouch available at Honored reputation, so I went back to Nagrand and started killing Ogres for beads, which I could turn in for reputation with them. Somewhere in between questing, grinding and helping friends in Dungeons, Wulf hit lvl 67. It's all pretty much a blur now.

On Sunday morning, I got up and got the last 90 beads I needed to reach Honored with The Consortium. It took me about three hours, and it turned out I only needed 80! That grind over, I went exploring through the Blade's Edge Mountains and Netherstorm zones looking for the Consortium's stronghold, Stormspire. Both zones look pretty interesting, and I'm going to make a point of questing there when I've finished Nagrand. I arrived in Stormspire only to find that the Pouch also required Wulf to be lvl 68 to equip it! ><

I still had half a level to go, but I'd done enough solo stuff by that point. I spent the afternoon running the Auchindon instances again with friends, still no loot, but Wulf got tantalisingly close to lvl 68. After the third run, my friends called it a night, but I was unable to. I went back to Nagrand and did some easy quests to get the last of the XP and dinged 68!

The Gun's nice, but it's the first Gun Wulf's ever had to use, so I spent an hour or so killing Spiders in Terokkar Forest to get his Gun Skill up to a useful level. I also spent a scandalous amount of gold to learn Wulf's new abilities at lvl 67 and 68, but I've yet to test them out.

New Toys for the Huntars!

As well as the variety of new items that The Burning Crusade offers us, and the sundry upgrades to exisiting class abilities, each of the even-numbered levels past 60 give the class brand new abilities.

At level 62, Hunters gained Steady Shot, which works as follows:

"A steady shot that causes (Ranged Attack Power*0.3+150) damage. Causes an additional 175 against Dazed targets."

On paper, it doesn't seem much, it costs me 110 mana and has a 1.5 second cast time for a shot that hits for a little less than one of my normal shots. What the cast time means, however is that I bypass the normal Global Cooldown applied to spells and can usually fit a shot in between normal shots, effectively doubling my damage.

The downside to Steady Shot is that this extra shot costs me 110 mana, and since a tight rotation will leave no time for the Five Second Rule(FSR) to take effect, I have little or no time to recover mana.

Which is why I'm glad of Aspect of the Viper at lvl 64:

"The hunter takes on the aspects of a viper, regenerating mana equal to 25% of his Intellect every 5 sec. Only one Aspect can be active at a time."

Since this mana regeneration is independant of the FSR, It allows me to keep up a high rate of damage even in an extended fight. I'm almost never out of this aspect these days, since I've found my playstyle now requires a ridiculous amount of mana most of the time.

Level 66 is round the corner for Wulf, and with it comes Kill Command:

"Give the command to kill, causing your pet to instantly attack for an additional 127 damage. Can only be used after the Hunter lands a critical strike on the target."

Reports back to me seem to suggest that it's not that efficent as an extra source of damage, especially since it inexplicably resets the Global Cooldown on cast. Where it seems to excel is when the Hunter accidently pulls aggro off the pet's target with a lucky critical strike. In that case, if you pop Kill Command, the sudden damage spike from the pet should give it a chance to regain aggro.

Level 68 will see Wulf getting the potentially amusing Snake(s in a muthaf**kin) Trap:

"Place a trap that will release several venomous snakes to attack the first enemy to approach. The snakes will die after 15 sec. "

I haven't heard enough about this ability to work out it's usefulness, but given that each of the snakes poisons have different effects (Slowing, Damage over Time, Direct Damage, etc) it has the potential to either be an incredibly crowd control tool or a shambolic mess that you only pull out on fun runs with your mates.

Finally, at level 70, Hunters get a role-defining ability in the form of Misdirection:

"Threat caused by your next 3 attacks is redirected to the target raid member. Caster and target can only be affected by one Misdirection spell at a time. Effect lasts 30 sec."

This elevates us from the role of Raid DPSbots to "pullers extraordinare". We no longer have to rely on a warrior's Taunt ability or our own Feign Death to smoothly transfer the hate from us to the tanks. It's so simple I dunno why they didn't think of it years ago.

But I'm going to go back and talk about damage now, since that's changed a lot with the introduction of Steady Shot. Before the changes in December our damage was centered around a tight 9 or 10 second shot rotation based on the cooldowns of Aimed Shot and Multi Shot. Under that system, only a few of the many guns in the game were truly viable as Hunter weapons. It also had a strong reliance on Multi Shot, which isn't always a useful or desireable shot to use in a raid situation.

With the changes in December's Patch 2.01, we came to rely more on our basic shot damage than ever before, punctuating it with Arcane and Multi Shots wherever appropriate. doing this, we were able to produce damage that was actually higher than before the patch, although I suspect we were still lagging behind the boosts the other damage classes got.

With lvl 62 and Steady Shot, we now have our full damage abilities. As long as you can keep up the mana cost, SS effectively doubles our damage, but it does so in a different way than before. Rather than hoping for a big Aimed Shot or Multi Shot critical to boost our place on the damage rankings (which can lead to over-aggroing and death), we have a spammable, controllable damage increase which we can stop when it looks like we might be taking over from the tank.

I presents some interesting itemisation challenges: The mana requirements will mean we need to use Aspect of the Viper more in long fights, and to invest more in gear which gives bonuses to Intellect or more mana regeneration. At the same time, a wider variety of ranged weapons become viable. Ideally you want a weapon that will allow you to cast a Steady Shot in between each of your Auto Shots, so depending on your reaction speed/network latency, anything with a weapon speed of 1.6 second or greater can be used. Wulf got a nice bow last night which, once his speed bonuses are applied to it, gives a final attack speed of around 1.92. Not exactly optimal, but just about right for my slow fingers to accomplish a smooth shot rotation.

The Burning Crusade thusfar.

So much to write about, so little time and inclination since I'd rather be playing. Still since I'm back at work after a week off, I'm going to use my breaks to bring folks up to speed on my thoughts and reflections on The Burning Crusade.

Here's a few snippets though:

*Hellfire Penninsula: The first zone beyond the Dark Portal. Many, many quests there, as well as the first two Dungeons. By the time even a newly-minted level 60 has finished this zone, they'll have gear on a par with a hardened Molten Core raider and experience of handling some tricky Dungeon fights. If you're already a hardened raider, this zone still offers a few rewards, but little actual challenge.

*Levelling: Not as hard as I first imagined. I'm averaging a level ever 10-12 hours of playtime. Wulf is now lvl 65 and if I'd gone all out, he could have been 66.

*Factions: Every zone has groups of people who want you to do stuff for them in exchange for the right to buy stuff. You could easily level just working to appease these various groups, and since leaving Hellfire Pennisula, that's pretty much all that Wulf has been doing.

*Gear: Wulf went into this game wearing full epic-level gear. Within a week, most of this has been replaced with Rare dungeon drops and quest items. One of his epic rings has in fact been replaced with an Uncommon-quality drop off a random mob.

*Huntering: Wulf's a Beastmaster, and loving it. He tamed a new pet on the first night, a Ravager which has supplanted his beloved Wolves as his main pet. It's a weird pet, high damage stats, high armor and low health, which means it's a great tank against enemies that do physical damage, but it tends to suffer when there's any magical or elemental damage flying around. Still, with talents in Beastmastery, Wulf's been able to use him to act as an Off Tank or even a Main Tank in dungeons with few problems.

The changes to Hunter damage have been marked. Now rather than doing damage in large spikes with inflexible shot rotations, Hunter damage is smoother, with more options to go from auto-shot spam to all-out nuke depending on the situation.

That's all I have for now. I'll do some more updates throughout the week, possibly with pictures as well.

More on the countdown.

Stormpaw's going on his first raid tonight, to the Ruins of Ahn'Qiraj. Unless it goes stunningly well, I'm gonna lean more and more towards Option 3 from yesterday's post. The more I think about it, the more I see the joy in Storm coming as much from the levelling and gearing up of the character as the playing itself.

If I pare Wulf down to something resembling this, then I have item drops that I can actually look forward to. Whilst it's nice having the higher tier gear, it's really only worth having for three reasons:

1) It makes the high end raid encounters much easier.
2) It makes you more powerful in PVP.
3) It enhances your "bragging rights".

None of these reasons are enough for me to stick with it, so in the bin they'll likely go. Although knowing my mind, I'll probably change my mind half a dozen times or so before the 16th.

To Peter's option...

In answer to Peter's Comment:

Paid Character Transfer would have been the first thing I'dve considered, if Storm wasn't a Hordie. The day they bring out a Paid Faction Transfer, I'm there!

Twelve days and counting...

In just under a fortnight, The Burning Crusade will be with us, and I'm faced with a difficult choice. Looking at the sheer amount of work involved in getting access to the endgame raid content in TBC, it's not something I'm gonna want to do with too many characters at once. Whilst it's true that a lot of the "work" involved will be accomplished in the process of levelling and gearing my characters through the new content, I'm honestly not sure what to prioritise.

I've been playing Stormpaw a lot, and I'm finding Druids a great, useful and faceted class. I've done a few small raids with CD with Wulfsblood to keep my hand in, but I just don't find him as exciting anymore. I've also accepted that because of the time I've played with Wulf, there won't be that much interesting gear at first whilst levelling. That said, there's still enough people in CD that I enjoy the company of (although fewer by the day) to make CD the place I wanna be.

I've got a few options and I'm undecided about what I'll go with:

1. Play Wulf with CD, grin and bear it and hope the fun finds me in the process.
2. Abandon Wulf and play exclusively with Stormpaw.
3. Sell a large amount of Wulf's high-end gear to a vendor to aritficially reinject the new content with challenge and excitement.
4. Start trying to level a Druid with CD, tagging along with the new CD alts.
5. Stop playing. And although some folks who know me may be skeptical, I've given this more thought that you might think.